g for
nature, curiosity sometimes seems to broaden into a more intimate kind
of communion. The heath, the village with its peasants, the change of
every hour among the fields and on the roads, mean more to him, in a
sense, than even the spectacle of man and woman in their blind, and
painful, and absorbing struggle for existence. His knowledge of woman
confirms him in a suspension of judgment; his knowledge of nature brings
him nearer to the unchanging and consoling element in the world. All the
quite happy entertainment which he gets out of life comes to him from
his contemplation of the peasant, as himself a rooted part of the earth,
translating the dumbness of the fields into humour. His peasants have
been compared with Shakespeare's; that is, because he has the
Shakespearean sense of their placid vegetation by the side of hurrying
animal life, to which they act the part of chorus, with an unconscious
wisdom in their close, narrow, and undistracted view of things.

In his verse there is something brooding, obscure, tremulous,
half-inarticulate, as he meditates over man, nature, and destiny:
Nature, 'waking by touch alone,' and Fate, who sees and feels. In _The
Mother Mourns_, a strange, dreary, ironical song of science, Nature
laments that her best achievement, man, has become discontented with her
in his ungrateful discontent with himself. It is like the whimpering of
a hurt animal, and the queer, ingenious metre, with its one rhyme set at
wide but distinct and heavily recurrent intervals, beats on the ear like
a knell. Blind and dumb forces speak, conjecture, half awakening out of
sleep, turning back heavily to sleep again. Many poets have been sorry
for man, angry with Nature on man's behalf. Here is a poet who is sorry
for Nature, who feels the earth and its roots, as if he had sap in his
veins instead of blood, and could get closer than any other man to the
things of the earth.

Who else could have written this crabbed, subtle, strangely impressive
poem?

AN AUGUST MIDNIGHT

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor;
On this scene enter--winged, horned, and spined--
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While 'mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands.

Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
--My guests parade my new-penned ink,
Or